Search Results

“... Musicologists are notorious both in and outside academic circles for their arcane habits of mind and their usually enraptured view of the mediocre and obscure. Paul Henry Lang – doyen of American musicology and the author of the magisterial Music in Western Civilisation – was never slow to point this out: ‘A scholar who, like a Hindu ascetic immersed in self-contemplation, confines himself to his narrow field of specialisation, loses the larger view ...”

“... make art out of self-effacement. This at least is one of the suggestions of the first volume of Christopher Isherwood’s Diaries, a whingeing, inward-bound mammoth of a book, where the author laboriously chronicles and inspects his every moment for changes in the moral and spiritual weather. Well, it can’t be his every moment, but it feels like it. Here ...”

“... to miss the spiritedly melodramatic understatement of his 1960s novels, in which anonymous men hatch nightmarish schemes while moaning about government-issue radiators, and the darkness is invariably laid on extra-thick. In one respect, the end of the Cold War and the shift from mutually assured destruction to asymmetric conflict ‘impacted’, as one of ...”

“... when a Scots Guards platoon executed 24 perfectly harmless Chinese plantation workers. Instead, Christopher Hale – a journalist with long experience reporting from Germany and South-East Asia – has put together a massive history of the British presence on the Malay peninsula. He tries to explain the outbreak of the jungle guerrilla war which began in ...”

“... chapter is typically intricate. Its congener is a report on Taino Indian beliefs, produced for Christopher Columbus by Ramón Pané, a Catalan friar on the island of Hispaniola. This short document, itself a case study in metamorphosis, survives only in an Italian translation incorporated into a biography of Columbus written by his son. It was drawn on by ...”

“... lords, how fare you? NAVARRE: My lord, they say That all the Protestants are massacred! This is Christopher Marlowe’s The Massacre at Paris, a play free of amateur pageants but featuring 19 onstage killings, most of them stabbings (one of an admiral whom we have already seen being shot, and another, a regicide, using an envenomed dagger). There is also ...”

“... a visit arranged by the Great Britain-USSR Society. My colleagues were the novelists Paul Bailey, Christopher Hope and Timothy Mo (who also writes for Boxing News), the poet Craig Raine (who doesn’t) and the playwright Sue Townsend of Adrian Mole fame. I had many misgivings about the trip, particularly in regard to creature comforts. I wondered, for ...”

“... state and without most of their artillery, which was still being dragged through Colney Hatch. Though many of the Hanoverian troops fought hard, they included a large number of raw recruits, unable to display the necessary discipline of moving in formation in response to changing orders. Their greater firepower was never properly exploited, and the ...”

“... to a metaphysical belief system that maps onto a culture’s history and ethics. But, to borrow Christopher Warnes’s contrast between ontology and irreverence in his Magical Realism and the Postcolonial Novel,* the approach of contemporary retellers of myths, including Ugrešić, makes clear that the readers they have in mind aren’t concerned with ...”

“... His arrival at Harvard brought on homesickness and haemorrhoids. He roomed for three years with Christopher Lasch, later the social historian who wrote The Culture of Narcissism (of which Updike was arguably an exemplar; certainly many of his characters were, particularly Harry Angstrom). Begley quotes Lasch’s letters home about his roommate: ‘None of ...”

“... imagination full rein. ‘I suppose they’d look at each other, wait a while before opening the hatch, and then lower their landing steps. The leader would stick his head out and step down onto the moon’s surface, still talking to HQ. ‘Saying what?’ asked Macmillan. There was a laugh as I said ‘Oh, I suppose his first words would be ...”

“... world and constantly execrated but never actually discussed. An exception is a little speech by St Christopher, the AA name of one of the alcoholics put in charge of Mungo, who makes a link with the upper classes, not an unusual suggestion in itself, but the angle is new:Well, they’re aw at it. It’s what us boys do when we’re alone. A bit of ...”

“... to her relationship with the subject, a close friend whom for many years she knew and admired – Christopher Sykes on Waugh is the nearest parallel? In such cases, affection can shape the compass of a biography, personal knowledge lighting up but also limiting what can be said. Perhaps there are traces of that here; but, on the whole, in the warmth and grace ...”